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Allwinner A10 : Is XBMC ported to MALI-400MP ?
Pivos funded to have XBMC ported, period. And with full knowledge that the source code would go open source and be used by others to port other hardware platforms. Now just think about that, some company funds development on a project that they know others will use. It that's not in the spirit of open source, I just don't know what is.
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Davilla, can this solution be reused for an arm-xbmc on aml products or is it working only with android?
Thanks
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Wow, who would have tought the news about the android port would generate this type of commotion. Strange !

Anyway, I will let this pass by me. Will check back in a week or so.

I am off playing with some new software.
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(2012-07-15, 17:22)davilla Wrote: Pivos funded to have XBMC ported, period. And with full knowledge that the source code would go open source and be used by others to port other hardware platforms. Now just think about that, some company funds development on a project that they know others will use. It that's not in the spirit of open source, I just don't know what is.

Like I've said earlier I have a Pivos AIOS device. I like the form factor, and I like the fact that it has a number of options in terms of optical out, USB 3, internal sata slot, etc. I hope they release a device with a similar amount of output options as the AIOS and the Mele A1000 under the XIOS brand. I'll probably get an XIOS regardless, but the Pivos AIOS was a bit of a let down and if it wasn't for the fact XBMC was ported I'd be hesitant to get it. The AIOS firmware is terrible.

Anyways I hope we don't see an influx of any more of these impatient trolls. I like the A1000 and the A10, it works pretty good, has VGA out, runs ubuntu.. it has a lot of promise. Right now I've got my A1000 at my sisters house running Netflix and Tunein radio for her. It's a decent device. But if you want XBMC right now, buy the Pivos. Support companies that support open source. How hard is that? Why would anyone whine about that? I just don't get it. If people want XBMC ported, get the company that manufactures the device to contribute either money or development time to it, don't come here and whine about things that "aren't fair" and do nothing productive. Gimli and other XBMC devs do it because it's interesting, not because they're being paid. Their currency is curiousity.
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Pivos funded the XBMC project, keeping it open source. I don't see any harm in this, they were smart to do so, ofcourse their sales will increase, but other companies like Allwinner, could have done the same...
Is this selling out? NO, and never say anything otherwise.
I think these fundings are beneficial for all parties, for the devs, for the people using xbmc and for pivos itself. Everything stays opensource, which is the most important thing.
I hope that people stop whining about everything, there's nothing to whine about, be happy about the progress.
I also have a Mele box and I also dream about having the full xbmc experience running on it, but the way I see it, the step with Pivos is a big step in that direction.
Again, kudos to all devs! Keep up the good work and don't let those stupid comments get to you. I wish I had better programming skills, that I could help you guys(maybe some day)
It's amazing that all you people are doing this for free, and most of you probably have a day job and do this in your spare time, which is even more amazing.
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The last few pages are a classic case of a wrong assumption (that any work done for a particular platform would not or could not transfer to others) amplified by a jaded view of human nature (that money would swamp any ethical concerns) producing a post that unnecessarily antagonised. This then fueled by a response or two done whilst (understandably) pissed off which didn't really provide anything other than a bit of venting.

XBMC is and always will be open source. As davilla pointed out, it was fortuitous that a player developed for a separate project transferred over to the Android case on this particular box. It doesn't rule out hardware acceleration on other platforms at all - indeed, some work has been done in parallel.

XBMC has only been running successfully on Android for about a month - huge efforts (nothing of substance by me) were required to get the build system under control and to iron out issues at runtime to get things to the state it currently is at (UI up, basic video + audio playback done, essentially feature complete). As soon as we were at the point that things were running reasonably stable and the build churn started to settle then we pushed out the release, as we know that we can't do this on our own: We don't have the assortment of devices to test on, and we also don't have as much experience as others outside of the team may have in this area. As always, we welcome help Smile

I have no doubt that HW acceleration will be worked on on various platforms as folk have interest in doing the work, as will utilising the image decoding chains and so on. It's non-trivial, but aspects of a player on one system typically transfer to another, even if that's just the lessons learnt during the process.

To repeat: there has never been, and will never be restrictions from working on a particular platform, or exclusivity to a particular platform. Indeed, this is essentially impossible, as each XBMC developer chooses what they want to work on - noone is bound by anything other than the spirit of open source development. If platform A is done before platform B it's simply due to access to the hardware, interest to work on it, and availability of tools to do the job.

Now let's get back to enjoying the efforts of davilla, gimli, Phaedoria, TheUni, Memphiz, Montellese, topfs2 et. al.

Cheers,
Jonathan
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
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Hear hear!
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For those reading this thread later on, a few of the super negative posts have been deleted for the sake of cooling things down.

There is no right or wrong to what was deleted, or sides being picked, just interest in helping things cool down.
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Great work guys, it amazes me how ungrateful some ppl can be for something that is FREE this is a huge step for XBMC and supporting every device under the sun just isnt a reasonable expectation the devs def know what they are doing and which devices they currently have the time to port to. With that being said, has anyone who has been able to test this on an A10 device noticed that mp3/m4a audio playback is pretty garbled? Or is it just my device? I know this is a pre-alpha build basically Im just wanting to make sure its an issue that not only my device is facing. Thx
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Is hardware acceleration for xios ds is included in this current apk? I asked because its very choppy on my xios ds.
use +/- ⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓
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Theres some fantastic work been done here - I take my hat off to the XBMC team.

I'm keen to understand more about the hardware acelleration challenges being faced. You'll have to excuse my ignorance here, but given that the Xios DS is essentially an A10 based device, I would've thought that any advancements made would also directly benefit other A10 devices too given the same SoC. Is this not the case or are the "other" devices constrained by the Android offerings being offered by their manufacturers?

Thanks in advance .
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Xios DS is most defiantly not essentially an A10 in the same way as it's not a tegra2. Please stop thinking that just because something is armv7/Mali that it is the same device. While a similar armv7 core and Mali GPU are present, just about everything else is different. You really have to understand how modern SoC are designed and made. Generally you take a CPU soft-core, marry in GPU and anything else you want, pay some IC foundation to turn the crank and out pops your chip. If you did your homework right, then the chip actually works too Smile Amlogic has their own SoC design, others too.

With Xios DS, we can use an amlogic based library that exists on android to skip OpenMax and go direct to hw decode/renderer. But because of how the lib works and API constraints, we had to do an internal player that works using the same API that our internal dvdplayer uses. While not 'perfect', it gets the job done.

With 'generic' android, we must use OpenMax which is hiding in android's private API. To use this we actually have to create an OpenMax-IL layer that talks to this private API. We could use something called OpenMax-AL but that only handles h264 in a transport stream... period. That means no mkv's, no nothing but h264 in a transport stream. Pretty limited. Same thing with Android's Media Player Class, h264 in a transport stream. boring as we don't want to rely on some big box doing transcoding like others, we want a real media center, right ?

But as jmarshall has said, once you do a full blown player, it's much simpler to take the concepts and apply them to other situations. A lot of time was spend re-discovering and documenting IPlayer API quirks, time that is not not required to create a different internal player that might be aimed at other hw.


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(2012-07-16, 04:01)davilla Wrote: Xios DS is most defiantly not essentially an A10 in the same way as it's not a tegra2. Please stop thinking that just because something is armv7/Mali that it is the same device. While a similar armv7 core and Mali GPU are present, just about everything else is different. You really have to understand how modern SoC are designed and made. Generally you take a CPU soft-core, marry in GPU and anything else you want, pay some IC foundation to turn the crank and out pops your chip. If you did your homework right, then the chip actually works too Smile Amlogic has their own SoC design, others too.

With Xios DS, we can use an amlogic based library that exists on android to skip OpenMax and go direct to hw decode/renderer. But because of how the lib works and API constraints, we had to do an internal player that works using the same API that our internal dvdplayer uses. While not 'perfect', it gets the job done.

With 'generic' android, we must use OpenMax which is hiding in android's private API. To use this we actually have to create an OpenMax-IL layer that talks to this private API. We could use something called OpenMax-AL but that only handles h264 in a transport stream... period. That means no mkv's, no nothing but h264 in a transport stream. Pretty limited. Same thing with Android's Media Player Class, h264 in a transport stream. boring as we don't want to rely on some big box doing transcoding like others, we want a real media center, right ?

But as jmarshall has said, once you do a full blown player, it's much simpler to take the concepts and apply them to other situations. A lot of time was spend re-discovering and documenting IPlayer API quirks, time that is not not required to create a different internal player that might be aimed at other hw.

Well there you go - thanks for the insight.
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(2012-07-16, 04:01)davilla Wrote: Xios DS is most defiantly not essentially an A10 in the same way as it's not a tegra2. Please stop thinking that just because something is armv7/Mali that it is the same device. While a similar armv7 core and Mali GPU are present, just about everything else is different. You really have to understand how modern SoC are designed and made. Generally you take a CPU soft-core, marry in GPU and anything else you want, pay some IC foundation to turn the crank and out pops your chip. If you did your homework right, then the chip actually works too Smile Amlogic has their own SoC design, others too.

You forgot the section where we send our guys over there to argue that they got the specs wrong, and that cornflakes are not in anyway suitable for calculating the thermal envelope of the chip.

As davilla said; the acceleration used currently doesn't come from the Mali-400. Amlogic included a VPU that handles video decoding. Its a whole separate IP Core inside the chip. Not all OEMs will pay for the licensing/documentation to use it either.

This is a win for everyone. XBMC is running on android! How is that a bad thing? I remember how proud I was when I got it to run on my xbox nearly a decade ago! That was an individual achievement! Soon, it will be clicking in the android play store or downloading an apk. Hardware acceleration support is limited right now, but it will grow with time. A step is a step. The source code is open, sitting there for your perusal! We just had the right tools to enable a hardware accelerated release much quicker. Sure, its platform specific, but the framework is there for everyone.
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(2012-07-16, 07:20)Pivos_BigC Wrote: This is a win for everyone. XBMC is running on android! How is that a bad thing? I remember how proud I was when I got it to run on my xbox nearly a decade ago! That was an individual achievement! Soon, it will be clicking in the android play store or downloading an apk. Hardware acceleration support is limited right now, but it will grow with time. A step is a step. The source code is open, sitting there for your perusal! We just had the right tools to enable a hardware accelerated release much quicker. Sure, its platform specific, but the framework is there for everyone.
My thougts exactly. I think majority of people understand the benefit of Android port and there is a limited number of paranoid users that see evil everywhere, where money appears. But devs have to eat too. A simple "thanks" won't feed them and their families.
Personally I am always very glad to see a company that invests money to porting existing well working open source SW rather than building custom shitty closed source FW.
We have the source code, lets make it work on our devices.

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